Every year, right around this time of year, I write an entry talking about how glad I am to have the friends I do, and how they all mean so much to me. Sometimes I try to enumerate them and actually write a bit of a blurb about each of them, individually; sometimes I just make blanket statements across them all; and sometimes, I write about them without mentioning any names.
Friends of mine ask me what I want; but there's nothing I want, because I already have all that I want (when we're talking about material stuff). And just like every year, the best thing anyone could give me is a card. I like sentimental stuff like that. They ask me if I want to do anything, too; and more often than not, I just want to spend a quiet day with friends.
Birthdays should be called "Friend Appreciation Days."
In my technical communication class today, we were given Some Helpful Rules For Better Writing, which I reproduce below:
1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end their sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, to, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
12. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
13. One should NEVER generalize.
14. Don't use no double negatives.
15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
16. The passive voice is to be ignored.
17. Never use big words when a diminutive one would suffice.
18. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
19. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: resist hypoerbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
Every now and then, I hear about some pop star who decides to quit and go back to school (the most immediate example that comes to mind is back in high school when Blumchen went back to school). Every time I hear about one of these things, everyone I know always praises them for "doing the smart thing" and talking about how they "can't stay a pop star forever," implying they'll need money to support themselves.
You're all fucking nuts.
If a pop star "doesn't do so well" and only manages to pull in 5 million dollars from their last 5 years of working and slaving away for the labels (where they get 5 million after all the cuts the labels take). For big pop stars, this isn't exactly a staggering number.
The vast majority of us will never see 5 million dollars in our lives. We will never understand what it means to have 5 million dollars. If we're lucky, then in our later years we may be able to have a job that pays us $100k/year; but don't forget taxes and other fun income removal services, so really we're only holding on to about $40k/year. Even if you pretend taxes didn't exist, it would take you 50 years working at a $100k/year job just to pull in 5 million dollars. Don't forget that with a job, you get taxes every year for what you made; if you've just made 5 million once, life's not quite so harsh on you (especially if you fudge your taxes).
If you're a pop star, and you've made a couple million, and chances are that if you stay on for another year you'll make even just $100k, you should do it because you're at least "breaking even" with a really well paid, highly educated person.
Quitting isn't the smart thing to do; it's to stop living like a ridiculously wealthy person and spend money in moderation. It seems it's more out of jealousy for the pop star's fame than anything that we find ourselves glad to hear that one of them has stepped down and become just one of us mere mortals.
You're all nuts.
In the course of bowling with Eric and Deep today, we discussed a few of the peculiar sports we find in this curious institution:
Bowling is the black man's game. One big black ball knocks down a bunch of tiny white pins.
Pool is the white man's game. The white ball knocks all the colored balls into holes, and saves the black ball for last.
You can tell how well my life is going by the lack of entries.
You can also tell how busy my life is by the lack of entries.
I'm now (almost) done with working on ASUC elections stuff, and all I can (and I think all I'm allowed to) say is thank the gods it's over.
Scattered paragraphs are like talking to a person with ADD.
When people start writing more meaningful journal entries I'll be more inclined to read them; why anyone reads mine is a mystery.
Every time I hang out with my friend Brett, one way or another the topic of determinism invariably rears its head. He came up to visit this past weekend, and while the beast didn't poke its head out of the waters this time, it was nonetheless always just beneath the surface.
And since I can't seem to get enough of my own voice (though really I don't much care for it), I'm going to vomit it up here.
So an argument people invariably bring up when talking about determinism is that since we don't know what's going to happen (we don't have all the information so we can't predict perfectly), the future is uncertain and we are free to do as we will. If you sit around and think about it for a bit, you can (almost) convince yourself this is true.
But suppose I was a robotics and AI genius. Let's say I construct a robot that is self-aware, metacognitive, and by all appearances looks and acts like any other human. My work is so great that people are unable to tell the difference between my robot and a human. My robot, being self-aware and metacognitive, begins to wonder if it has free will. I've cleverly hidden some of its data from it, and just for fun design it so that it eventually comes to the conclusion presented above, and is content with the knowledge that since it doesn't have all the facts, it has free will.
But underneath all these big words about thought and mind is a very deterministic program that does exactly what it's programmed to. While the robot doesn't have all the cards, I do; and so its actions are, to me, completely deterministic. The robot isn't free to do as it wishes, it just thinks it is.
It doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to relate this to the relationship between man and God. Man doesn't know everything; he thinks he's free. God's sitting up on his high perch watching and laughing while he throws down another fistful of popcorn.
There's a long discussion that usually follows, but I'm way too tired for it now. Lucky you!
If you ever want to provide motivation for your partner to cheat, just make sure things are going really well.
A healthy relationship is like a healthy body; you don't appreciate how effortless it is to breath, to swallow, or to see until you lose the ability to do so. Likewise, when your relationship is going well, you don't notice how easy it is to assume your girl's not cheating, that you two have a good thing going on, and that there's no reason to worry about being alone.
It's the things we take for granted that are most important to us...we just don't realize it most of the time.